'Tis the Season - iPoint Founders Letter

Hi, Brooks here, the founder and CEO of iPoint. I'd like to share some exciting updates with you before the holiday season gets hectic. We want to close out this year with the things that matter most to you and hopefully create excitement for what’s next for us in 2023.

?We have experienced a lot of growth these last 5-6 months, with many new community members, new employees in support/ data/ and business operations,?employees shifting into leadership roles and we are on the precipice of releasing new features by the end of next month and throughout 2023.

Support

Since the last letter in June, we have added three new support personnel to assist in our growth and provide you with a shorter wait, call-back times, and real-time help. Maybe you have already called and spoken with Micheal, Brad, or Will. Micheal is Virginia born but is currently in Florida and studying Accounting. Brad is a true native Kentuckian who enjoys playing and collecting classic video games and legos. Will is in South Carolina and enjoys outdoor sporting activities like snowboarding and sailing. All three have taken responsibility by the horns and are doing an outstanding job.

?We continue to refine and improve our support tools and processes, and with the help of the new support team members, we have driven response times down drastically. We continually strive to improve our level of service and hope you feel the same from your end.

Where Have We Been

?This year has been an exciting and eventful one. We typically attend a few top industry shows and conferences each year for Pro Source and HTSA, and this year we had the pleasure of joining an additional two events. We had a great time in Aspen, Colorado, where we spent a full week with the members of The Guild. This is a small group of some of the best companies in the industry, and we took many ideas away from that event, some of which you will see in our new platform coming next year.

?We also sponsored the Total Tech Summit in Orlando, FL,?just last month, where we spoke with many of you and engaged several new companies who have never heard of us before. The Total Tech event afforded us the platform to announce many of the features you will learn about in this letter and will see very soon.

What We Are Doing Now?

iPoint Online

This is part of that?SPEED SPEED SPEED?I previously shared. We are going through our entire platform, every data field, and every button click and optimizing it for the web. With benefits like faster loading times, the ability to work anywhere, and browser-based, so no need to download any new software.?We are making significant headway, and it should be released by the end of January 2023.?

?PO Receipts

?We will release a new PO Receipt system that will track each batch of receipts in their own document, which will push to QuickBooks. This will provide a lot more clarity on when quantities are received and by whom. In addition, the new interface will make serial number capture possible for stock items, meaning we will be able to track serialized items from receipt to delivery.

?FIFO/LIFO

?With the release coming at the end of this year, we will be shifting to using FIFO/LIFO for inventory asset tracking. This will provide the most accurate valuation method to maintain your asset values on your balance sheet. We will be enabling FIFO by default, but if you desire to use LIFO, you can change it. If you don’t know what LIFO or FIFO means, we will have documentation coming with the release, but in short, it tracks the values of items as they come in and then reduces asset values by first in or last in. This helps maintain accurate values as items are constantly changing cost.

?Design & Engineering

?Launching in December in beta form for all our Community Members.?As a UX design, it is simplified to allow you to import from the proposal and then easily drag and drop the items with ease. We will support schematic, line, and elevation plans and customizable icons. You can build out your racks and connect wires to your in and outs.

New Mobile Apps

?Our new native apps will provide a fresh experience to iOS AND Android users. The apps will allow your technicians to be more productive and plugged in. We hope to have the new apps ready by the end of Q2 in 2023, with more features coming throughout the year as we expand them to include many more iPoint modules recrafted for the mobile experience.

?Integration with?Portal.io

?By the end of this year, we hope to release our new integration with Portal, allowing proposals created in Portal to be imported into iPoint for invoicing, inventory, and project management. This integration has been asked for by many of you over the past few years, and we are excited to see what the community does with it. More details will follow on this as it is ready to be used.

Looking Ahead To 2023

?iPoint has been based on Filemaker, and we have been on this platform for over ten years now. While Filemaker has allowed us to do a lot of amazing things, we are always looking forward to the next ten years, and as we continue to improve our core Filemaker platform, we have begun building a new platform called Rythm from the ground up on the latest technologies available.

?Rythm will be our next-generation platform which will be fully hosted and enable us to provide many of the much-needed applications you have been asking for. As we create new applications on this platform, we will ensure the ability to use the new tools along with the existing iPoint platform.?

?We have two concurrent projects in the works on the Rythm platform.

?CRM

?Rythm CRM will be an all-new platform designed to make managing your sales opportunities intuitive and fun while providing unparalleled tools to manage your diverse and remote teams across locations, branches, and even companies.

Analytics

?Analytics is being built on the Rythm platform and is a stand-alone system that ingests data from iPoint, QuickBooks, and other Rythm modules and will provide a comprehensive set of tools for you to build customized reports and dashboards. These reports and dashboards will be designed with responsive charts and tables and will allow you to email out the reports on a repeating schedule automatically. The dashboards will be able to consolidate the data from multiple sources like iPoint and QuickBooks, allowing you to have every KPI instantly available.

To Wrap Up

?I would like to extend a sincere thank you for being a part of our iPoint family, as 2022 was a big year and 2023 will be even bigger. We wish you a very happy and joyous Holiday Season and hope these updates will continue to alleviate your business chaos while bringing growth and success.

?Happy Holidays,

From all of us at iPoint!